I have been a dirtbag for many months now. It depends on how you measure true dirtbaggery, but it was certainly underway when I was in New Zealand in July of last year. If you count the time I spent living in Canberra housesitting and bumming and not paying rent then it goes back to August of 2010, but I had a job back then so I guess that's ruled out. Anyway, it's been a long time. In fact, looking back at my life, you could probably say I've been a dirtbag since high school in 2001 with a brief interruption of full-time paid work in 2010-11.
This fine pedigree of dubious living has ingrained in me certain habits that are fundamental to my identity and personality: A refusal to wash my hair, a loathing of paid work, a willingness to eat out of bins, the ability to sleep fully dressed on the floor of a busy room, an abiding suspicion of soap, etc. But the most powerful of these habits relates to food, and specifically free food. When there is free food I am compelled, like a gospel author guided by the divine will, to eat it all.
Generally in the life of a dirtbag this is a healthy habit. Free food is usually scarce enough and paying for food usually distasteful enough that eating all the free food you can find makes for a varied, unpredictable and passably healthy diet. But there are times when free food becomes abundant, and during those times it can be difficult, even impossible, to exercise restraint.
Life at Broken River at the moment is one of those times. I have, through an almost obsessive-compulsive commitment to parasitism, managed to finagle free food and lodging in exchange for volunteer work. This food comes in the form of dinners which are prepared (occasionally by me) at one of the lodges, and which I have come to think of as a magical river of food. At around 7pm each night, a certain bench in the designated lodge is covered first with soup, then with some kind of hearty main course, and then with a dessert. Usually there is a lot of food. Invariably it is free.
And so I eat. Dear lord, how I eat. At the time I make all kinds of excuses to myself, like "This meal is high in fresh vegetables," or "My, that serving spoon was larger than I thought," but each night it is the same. I eat a great deal of soup and roughly twice as much main course as is sensible, whereupon I feel uncomfortably full.
At this point the rational part of my brain that I rely on for talking to police officers and customs officials kicks in and I resolve not to eat dessert. But I am not so deluded as to believe that I actually a rational agent, and within a few minutes I always find that I have unconsciously piloted my body through the dessert gathering process like some kind of meat robot. Of course, once I have collected the dessert, I feel uncomfortable letting it go to waste, so I push through, tak
OH MY GOD, MY SCREEN IS FLICKERING SO BADLY I NEED TO TAKE A SHORT BREAK AND CRUSH MY EYEBALLS INTO MY HEAD.
OK, the screen on my poor broken laptop is still flickering like a strobe light from some kind of office-job hell, but I'll push on.
Anyway, I was saying that I eat a large serving of dessert that I had previously committed not to eat, taking me from mere discomfort to outright nausea. Despite my best efforts, this process repeats every night.
To make matters worse, the staff all encourage me to keep eating. Indeed, they encourage me to go to dinner in the first place. And in a sense, they are doing me a huge favour. The more food I eat at BR the less often I have to go to town, and since I no longer have a car (a story for another day), that is a huge bonus. Plus, I suspect they see me as some kind of strange starving vagrant urchin child, and by feeding my they keep me from subsisting on moss, leaves and pine cones. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that this perception is largely true, and that the forest in this area is devoid of pine cones, this situation is startlingly reminiscent of aid programs in developing nations. Everyone has good intentions, but a mix of cultural misunderstandings, circumstances and corruption (of my stunted and malformed soul) mean that instead of receiving a nutritious meal to subsist upon I leave feeling bloated, ill, and flushed with self loathing.
All this is made slightly more awkward by the fact that the staff will read this entry, so hello staff. As an aside, the expression "ticket tart" which I used (by in no way invented or coined) way back in July has been adopted for semi official use here. I feel at once proud and sheepish.
And yes, I'll try to post more. Things have been vaguely happening, and I should write about them, but I'm busy with the eating and the feeling gross and the skiing and all that stuff. Also, it's just a matter of time until this laptop gives me seizures, so I'm trying to cut back on internet use.
